Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Effort

Any time someone talks about something being "effortless" or seeing someone appear to do a task "effortlessly," what they are actually seeing is the culmination of tons of effort put in over long periods of time, usually willingly but sometimes grudgingly like in the case of teenagers who don't really want to get out of bed but totally want to do something cool that they planned for that day.

Effort also strolls around in the mask of "perseverance" and "motivation."

Newsflash: there is not a direct correlation between effort and excellence. Some people put all of their effort into the wrong thing and do it poorly. Like the one time a student made a map of Europe and put eleventy million toothpicks with flags on them that represented something that was not even close to what the assignment was and then sicced her mom on me when she got a 'C.' "But she worked really hard," said her mom, which was the equivalent of saying that she worked really hard to dig a hole when what I asked for was a paved road.

But I digress.

Effort is a tricky thing in that no matter how hard you want something, sometimes you just don't want to put in the effort. Building the tiny house was like that sometimes. Going to yoga is like that sometimes. Being a writer is like that most times.

Still trying to figure out how to reliably suck it up and put in the effort, even on the days where I would rather sit in a coffee shop and stare out at the water, except I don't even want to put the effort in to get to the coffee shop.

Thoughts? How do you make yourself do stuff you want to do when you don't want to do it?